Tag: container-management

Rancher Labs Launches Rancher 2.0, the First Container Management Platform to Work with Any Kubernetes Cluster

Rancher 2.0 technical preview makes it easier to use both self-managed and cloud-managed Kubernetes clusters

Cupertino, Calif. – September 26, 2017 –Rancher Labs, a provider of container management software, today announced the availability of the technical preview of Rancher 2.0. This latest release makes it possible to manage all Kubernetes clusters under a single Rancher instance. Users can stand up and manage new Kubernetes clusters using the Rancher Kubernetes distribution or import existing Kubernetes clusters, including hosted container services such as Google Container Engine. Read more

Why Smart Container Management is Key

For anyone working in IT, the excitement around containers has been hard to miss. According to RightScale, enterprise deployments of Docker over doubled in 2016 with 29% of organizations using the software versus just 14% in 2015 [1]. Even more impressive, fully 67% of organizations surveyed are either using Docker or plan to adopt it. While many of these efforts are early stage, separate research shows that over two thirds of organizations who try Docker report that it meets or exceeds expectations [2], and the average Docker deployment quintuples in size in just nine months. Clearly, Docker is here to stay. Read more

If you’re going to successfully deploy containers in production, you need more than just container orchestration

Kubernetes is a valuable tool

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestrator for deploying and managing containerized applications. Building on 15 years of experience running production workloads at Google, it provides the advantages inherent to containers, while enabling DevOps teams to build container-ready environments which are customized to their needs.

The Kubernetes architecture is comprised of loosely coupled components combined with a rich set of APIs, making Kubernetes well-suited for running highly distributed application architectures, including microservices, monolithic web applications and batch applications. In production, these applications typically span multiple containers across multiple server hosts, which are networked together to form a cluster.

Kubernetes provides the orchestration and management capabilities required to deploy containers for distributed application workloads. It enables users to build multi-container application services and schedule the containers across a cluster, as well as manage the health of the containers. Because these operational tasks are automated, DevOps team can now do many of the same things that other application platforms enable them to do, but using containers.

But configuring and deploying Kubernetes can be hard

It’s commonly believed that Kubernetes is the key to successfully operationalizing containers at scale. This may be true if you are running a single Kubernetes cluster in the cloud or have reasonably homogenous infrastructure. However, many organizations have a diverse application portfolio and user requirements, and therefore have more expansive and diverse needs. Read more

On Friday we released version 1.5 of the Rancher container management platform. The enhancements in this release are designed to help ensure enterprise- as well as production-readiness. Additional webhooks improve Rancher extensibility and enable you to optimize overall infrastructure utilization. New API, networking and container scheduling policies provide fine-grained control of the container environment. Additional enhancements include metadata performance improvements and conditional logic support for catalog templates. Read more

Docker containers make app development easier. But deploying them in production can be hard.

Software developers are typically focused on a single application, application stack or workload that they need to run on a specific infrastructure. In production, however, a diverse set of applications run on a variety of technology (e.g. Java, LAMP, etc.), which need to be deployed on heterogeneous infrastructure running on-premises, in the cloud or both. This gives rise to several challenges Read more

Cupertino, Calif. – January 25, 2017 – Rancher Labs, a provider of container management software, today announced momentum in 2016, doubling its employees, exceeding revenue targets by twenty percent and surpassing 19 million software downloads. This growth underscores the heavy demand for its popular open source software that simplifies the deployment and running of containers in production, on any infrastructure.

“2016 was a successful and rewarding year for us, with much of it achieved by the support from our deeply engaged community of developers, users, partners and customers, for which we are incredibly appreciative,” said Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs. “The container industry is fast-moving, and we have a number of plans for this year to ensure we are even better positioned for success. We have a complete and easy-to-use solution, and are the only product on the market that supports Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos, runs containers on all clouds and delivers these capabilities via an incredibly simple user interface.”

General Availability and Product Enhancements

In March, the company announced the general availability of Rancher, its open source container management platform, including several key enhancements since its original beta release in June 2015. Since Rancher was introduced, Rancher Labs pushed 553 releases which includes key new features such as modular infrastructure services and the ability to use the Rancher orchestration features or the integrated Kubernetes, Docker Swarm or Mesos distributions. In its most recent releases, Rancher Labs extended the Rancher infrastructure services capabilities with Read more